Lately we've heard two major opinions about ethanol. One by the automotive industry one by ethanol opponents. We've been told over and over by the Big Three (that is the three makers of the world's worst automobiles - GM, Ford and Chrysler) that ethanol i s THE definitive answer to our foreign oil woes. We've been told by ethanol nay-sayers that we have neither the capacity nor the money to switch entirely to ethanol for our domestic fuel supply. Both assertions at their base are patently false. Both assertions are based on the self interests of the parties involved.

OK, fist off, a quiz: who uses 61% of the US domestic corn yield?

The answer: Cattle growers.

The main opponents to the high price of corn and ethanol are cattle growers. They are a huge lobby in the US - bigger than tobacco and almost as influential in Washington as big oil. Trouble is, the beef industry in the US is on its way out. It doesn't know it yet but Americans aren't crazy for beef per se. If it were not for the fast food industry, beef and chicken would be consumed in nearly equal quantities. Currently beef uses a massive media campaign to spur its lagging sales. It's still king by a long shot but ask any beef marketing lacky, sales have been better.

Eventually as competing fast food interests take hold in US markets, beef will loose its strangle hold on Washington. Until that day however, they will oppose any industry that competes for its share of the US corn yield. Still the beef growers would have you believe that ethanol competes with the corn that US citizens eat. The truth is that if you took beef off of the corn menu, we would be swimming in corn and eventually have to pave our highways with it just to keep it from smothering our nation.

Consider also that the planned source of ethanol is not corn but switchgrass. Now switchgrass ethanol technology is an emerging technology but frankly, a dedication to ethanol production in the US is still ten or more years away. We can and do make ethanol from switchgrass today. We will have a viable production process within a few years. When we commit to ethanol, switchgrass will be ready.

The other big assertion that is patently false is that ethanol is THE definitive answer for our fuel needs. It will help. It may even put the US back on the path to internal reliance upon fossil fuels. What it won't do is end our dependence on petroleum completely and reduce our emissions of harmful toxins into our air (let's forget the argument about global warming for a moment). Ultimately our vehicular energy consumption lies in a non-combustion future. Yes, I'm talking electric. I won't even worry about swaying the anti-electric crowd. Electric motor technology simply wins over internal combustion/cam-driven technology in every way. Electric's single drawback is recharge time and recharge infrastructure which - by a strange coincidence - is the reason the Big Three love ethanol so much.

The Big Three want ethanol because switching to ethanol would mean almost no change to their business model. Ethanol is a liquid with similar handling characteristics to petroleum. The same gas stations that pump your fuel now would pump ethanol with little or no modification. Basically Ford, Chrysler and GM want to enter the future by doing nothing. Ethanol is their way out of the alternative fuel conundrum. It appeases the greenies while allowing the Big Three to produce the same substandard product they have produced for over a century. That is their sole interest in and involvement with ethanol. It means business as usual. If you knew what I knew about GM, for example, you would understand that this more than any other imperative drives the US auto industry. Make more, don't change, avoid fourth quarter losses at all costs.

So my point? The information about ethanol being reported at the moment is flat out wrong - from every side.

1) There is no corn shortage, there is a vast beef surplus.

2) Ethanol won't solve the US energy problem, it will only put off a final solution to the matter.

3) Ford GM and Chrysler should not be basis for choosing our next generation fuel.

What America needs to do is look at what it has available and base its decision on abundance and technology. The one drawback to a liquid fuel economy is that you consume much of your product supporting distribution. Refineries, ships and trucks all burn the same fuel that they carry. Ultimately we need to think about energy that requires no wheels to move.

Just a thought.

So, Vista has Zero-Day exploits. So, OSX Tiger just got a 64-point critical security megapatch. It seems like every add-on and accessory to our operating systems of choice brings with it security issues, viruses and program errors. How can Windows and OSX keep up?

The answer, of course is simple. They need to stop.

While I was disabling Dashboard on my Mac the other day something occurred to me. An operating system is a shell used to manage files. It opens, executes, renames, deletes and locates your files. The fact that OSX can't locate all of the files on it's attached hard drives actually means it doesn't meet the minimum requirements for being an OS. For the love of GOD, if an operating system can't access or show you all of the files recorded on your storage devices, what exactly is it doing?

Operating systems have become - both for Apple and Microsoft - an ever growing mutant abomination of music players, image utilities, web browsers and disk utilities. Each added doodad brings with it an unavoidable reduction in speed, security and reliability. Linux has several really sleek and powerful operating systems, Red Hat among them. Yet the reason that these operating systems seem sleek and powerful has little to do with LINUX. It is the fact that these operating systems are young, simple and have a small footprint that makes them seem powerful. Ever wonder what Windows 3.11 would run like on my 3.3Ghz PC? Files would open so fast that my computer would actually go back in time. 3.11 was small and text based. It used little memory and had few extras - unless you count Mine Sweeper.

Both Microsoft and Apple have seen the increase in processor power and memory size as license to pull all the stops on their OS footprint. OSX is larger than almost any application I can purchase for the Mac. Want to run Maya? Have enough memory to run Maya AND Tiger? What Vista and the nascent Leopard have become is not so much an operating system but an appliance. That's right, Apple and Microsoft are desperately trying to turn our computers into VCRs.

Ask yourself this: how many freeware or shareware applications that you use daily actually reproduce some function already available to you on your PC or Mac? Let me make a partial list for you: Winamp, WinDVD, Audion 3, filebuddy, CuteFTP, Amp Calendar, Atomic Clock. I could go on but the internet is a crowded place already. Given that our operating systems already play music, organize our files and FTP (sorry Tiger) why do we resort to these third party applications? Because our operating systems don't play music, organize our files or FTP worth a damn. The operating system which is supposed to be a front end portal to our files is now designed to replace our third party files. The logical outcome is to simply manufacture a machine that has no software other than the OS and the OS does everything. Only problem, it would - by design - suck.

Given that applications exist that perform a given task better than the OS ever could and given that we prefer our own applets to the appendices provided by Apple and Microsoft and given that these included applets reduce or degrade our operating system's ability to function, why not simply leave them out? It is clear that the current hodge-podge makes boot times interminable and in the case of OSX prevents it from performing even the most basic fetch functions. It is time that we said - enough!

We need to scale our operating systems back to a point where they can, well, operate. Then we can load our machines with all the silly applets we want. Hell, we already treat our favorite applets like pets. Microsoft and Apple should obviously still produce all manner of gizmos like iTunes, Windows Media Player and Dashboard. They just should load at boot. Imagine a world where that spiffy new Gojillion Ghz machine actually performed the way you imagined a 3.3ghz computer with four gigs of ram actually should. Your only trouble then would be coping with the sonic booms created by applications opening on your desktop.

So, Vista has Zero-Day exploits. So, OSX Tiger just got a 64-point critical security megapatch. It seems like every add-on and accessory to our operating systems of choice brings with it security issues, viruses and program errors. How can Windows and OSX keep up?

The answer, of course is simple. They need to stop.

While I was disabling Dashboard on my Mac the other day something occurred to me. An operating system is a shell used to manage files. It opens, executes, renames, deletes and locates your files. The fact that OSX can't locate all of the files on it's attached hard drives actually means it doesn't meet the minimum requirements for being an OS. For the love of GOD, if an operating system can't access or show you all of the files recorded on your storage devices, what exactly is it doing?

Operating systems have become - both for Apple and Microsoft - an ever growing mutant abomination of music players, image utilities, web browsers and disk utilities. Each added doodad brings with it an unavoidable reduction in speed, security and reliability. Linux has several really sleek and powerful operating systems, Red Hat among them. Yet the reason that these operating systems seem sleek and powerful has little to do with LINUX. It is the fact that these operating systems are young, simple and have a small footprint that makes them seem powerful. Ever wonder what Windows 3.11 would run like on my 3.3Ghz PC? Files would open so fast that my computer would actually go back in time. 3.11 was small and text based. It used little memory and had few extras - unless you count Mine Sweeper.

Both Microsoft and Apple have seen the increase in processor power and memory size as license to pull all the stops on their OS footprint. OSX is larger than almost any application I can purchase for the Mac. Want to run Maya? Have enough memory to run Maya AND Tiger? What Vista and the nascent Leopard have become is not so much an operating system but an appliance. That's right, Apple and Microsoft are desperately trying to turn our computers into VCRs.

Ask yourself this: how many freeware or shareware applications that you use daily actually reproduce some function already available to you on your PC or Mac? Let me make a partial list for you: Winamp, WinDVD, Audion 3, filebuddy, CuteFTP, Amp Calendar, Atomic Clock. I could go on but the internet is a crowded place already. Given that our operating systems already play music, organize our files and FTP (sorry Tiger) why do we resort to these third party applications? Because our operating systems don't play music, organize our files or FTP worth a damn. The operating system which is supposed to be a front end portal to our files is now designed to replace our third party files. The logical outcome is to simply manufacture a machine that has no software other than the OS and the OS does everything. Only problem, it would - by design - suck.

Given that applications exist that perform a given task better than the OS ever could and given that we prefer our own applets to the appendices provided by Apple and Microsoft and given that these included applets reduce or degrade our operating system's ability to function, why not simply leave them out? It is clear that the current hodge-podge makes boot times interminable and in the case of OSX prevents it from performing even the most basic fetch functions. It is time that we said - enough!

We need to scale our operating systems back to a point where they can, well, operate. Then we can load our machines with all the silly applets we want. Hell, we already treat our favorite applets like pets. Microsoft and Apple should obviously still produce all manner of gizmos like iTunes, Windows Media Player and Dashboard. They just should load at boot. Imagine a world where that spiffy new Gojillion Ghz machine actually performed the way you imagined a 3.3ghz computer with four gigs of ram actually should. Your only trouble then would be coping with the sonic booms created by applications opening on your desktop.